Socialism, ethics, and humanity (III)

(Last in series here)

Socialism could provide us with a chance to flourish, to fulfil our natures, in a way that is not possible under capitalism. There's a bitter irony about this, since capitalism itself is responsible for transforming both what it is to be human and the capacity to realise the possibilities inherent in this far beyond the imaginings of any previous age. Technology has stretched our potential for creativity, communications have broadened our imaginations and deepened our needs, and labour-saving innovations offer us the hope of producing all that we want in a fraction of the time and with far less effort than could ever have been contemplated. All of this has been conjured up by the very same capitalism that stunts its potential, producing as it does for profit rather than human need. The task of realising capitalism's potential falls to socialism. More concretely, it falls to another of capitalism's creations, the working class.

What does this picture mean imply about our politics, which was after all where this series started? Socialism, as I've sketched it, is about the big picture. It concerns how we organise the world in a way that our lives can be good. This is not the fare of those who for whom the horizons of politics do not go beyond marginal tax rates or urban traffic schemes. The picture is not naive; contrary to almost every textbook portrayal of Marx's thought, socialism is not inevitable. It might not even be particularly likely; still we socialists, with a cold hardened realism, think that it is the only option for an unfulfilled and divided humanity threatened with environmental catastrophe. The diagnosis becomes even more severe now that capitalism cannot afford social democracy.

This picture has to be communicated. In our conversations, not least with all those new Labour Party members, at meetings, in print, we should be talking about socialism. It is a persistent temptation for the Left to play its ideas close to its chest, keeping a conspiratorial silence about its thoughts on the means of production and preferring instead to talk about the minimum wage and Trident. Delicate judgements need to be made here, of course. There are times for forming broad alliances, and no profitable conversation has ever been had by not meeting somebody where they are at. Yet, meeting somebody where they are at is one thing, leaving them there something altogether.

Now is a time for laying out the socialist stall. Thousands of people have wandered into a place where they can inspect its wares, because of the so-called Corbyn surge. Contrary to all that excitable stuff about entryism, the politics of this group are mixed, and often vague. Retaining these people will need something that warrants commitment: we have that and we should share it. This is the case not least because there is a rough road ahead, the present purge being one intimation of this, and without a framework within which peoples' experiences can be situated, a good number are likely simply to walk away. Even if the party bureaucrats tire of purging, the initial enthusiasm of Labour's new members will either fade away, or worse be converted into the reality-denying optimism that pollutes too much of the Left: the stable alternative lies in the realm of ideas.

The mention of optimism leads me to another aspect of this understanding of socialism that deserves mention. A political outlook that recognises the animal, embodied nature of human beings, as this one does - it is this nature to which socialism speaks - can be far more nuanced in its view of our prospects and more sensitive to our fragility than is often the case on the Left. One popular story goes as follows: conservatives have a dim view of human nature, which is enmeshed in Original Sin, or held back by genetics, depending on the conservative account in question. Humanity's grand projects are doomed to fail; society will not improve, at least not consistently, and the best that can be done is to insulate ourselves from violent motion with a generous layer of tradition and order. Progressives meanwhile (note the word) see human beings as perfectable. With a good amount of social progress, and perhaps a bit of luck, the New Jerusalem can be built on earth.

There is a very obvious sense in which human beings are not perfectable. People are not going to stop dying, or mourning. No matter who owns the means of production, it is likely that couples will still have acrimonious break ups, people will be thoughtless, and lives go inexplicably wrong. It is certainly true that human history is littered with progress and triumphs, and to be a socialist is not least to hope for a good deal more progress. It's just that a genuinely radical, rather than deludedly progressive, outlook recognises that progress is itself not without ambiguity, tragedy even. The capitalism that lends substance to the hopes I have been describing also led now forgotten children to deaths in hellish mills. The 20th century witnessed victories for women's liberation and anti-colonialism; it also saw the doctrine of human rights that had motivated many participants in this struggles used to justify brutal wars. The light-headed and cheaply upbeat attitude that has, unfortunately, followed in the wake of the Corbyn victory, if it is to give rise to a sustainable socialism, has to mature into a more sensitive and ambivalent take on our species and its history.

Stripped of unwarranted euphoria, counting the costs of struggle, the aim of this politics is to allow us to be ourselves. That is what the emphasis on fulfilling our nature amounts to. Ours is not a programme for angels or robots, but for the wonderful, tormented, ageing, animal beings that we in fact are. It cannot offer us limitless possibilities, because our possibilities are not limitless. However much the Situationists asked us to demand the impossible (and there is a sense in which that is the right thing to demand), we cannot travel faster than light, live a thousand lives, resurrect the dead, or do more than our energies, physical or emotional, allow us. Fashionable though it is in millenial circles to talk about 'self-definition' I cannot define myself, and much unnecessary anxiety has been caused by suggesting otherwise. Nor does our politics promise to do away with flaws, mistakes, irritations, or limitations. Socialism is a politics of human frailty: its simple suggestion is that we live in the world as the kind of beings that we are in fact. To make this more than a pipedream would indeed take a revolution, but perhaps one a good deal more compassionate in its aims than many think.

If we think this it should affect the way we conduct and understand ourselves. There is a relentlessness and puritan earnestness about parts of the Left, the latter being a correlate of underestimating the scope and difficulty of transformation. Taking frailty more seriously would be an important counterbalance here, and is one of our most urgent tasks.

Lies of the Labour leadership contest 8: Foo Fighters are a Trotskyist front organisation.

Lie 8:

Tweeting about Foo Fighters is out of order.

Bollocks because:

Before we get to this, we should note the hypocrisy. The people making this judgement are the rump of a political movement that used D:Ream's Things Can Only Get Better as a campaign song. They are in no position to adjudicate on musical taste. 

But really, you should fucking love Foo Fighters. 

Definitely Maybe

It is, several radio programmes and broadsheet articles inform us, twenty years since the 'Summer of Britpop'. I was there, young and music-loving. Comparisons with earlier golden ages are inexact; it can't have been like the 60s, since I can remember it. It involved, as I recall, inordinate amounts of Guinness combined with indelicate swaying to the dulcit tones of What's The Story Morning Glory. We weren't aware that it was the Summer of Britpop at the time. It was just summer, the school holiday. Nor did we, by which I mean my friends and myself, think there was anything especially epoch-making about the music we were listening to, or rather the music that was played at us, in pubs and clubs and on the radio; my own tastes were slightly more eclectic. It was alright, it was just there. We hadn't known any different. Nostalgia, however can transfigure the most quotidian of times, and so here we are, two decades on, keeping the anniversary of something called the Summer of Britpop.

There is something distinctly unsettling about people feeling nostalgic for periods within one's living memory. Nostalgia is always for people older than oneself. It is more a matter of not being able to get bananas in the war, or the electric tingle as a beehived girl rubbed against your chinos than of the Verve or David Blunkett. The jarring intimation of mortality repressed beneath the surface of this discomfort might go some way towards explaining why I have greeted public celebration of Britpop's birthday with a mixture of incomprehension and blind rage. So, when 6Music announced that they had made Oasis' Knebworth performance available on Iplayer, I tweeted this:

NO I DON'T WANT TO LISTEN TO OASIS AT KNEBWORTH. Like New Labour it deserves to remain two decades away.

— (((Latte Labour))) (@LatteLabour) 15 August 2016

This perhaps demonstrated a temporary inability to think both sides of the question, but then age does funny things to you. A good proportion of my digital fury was entirely justified, but before we get onto the reasons for that the other side of the balance sheet needs addressing. The Britpop phenomenon, either in its musical origins or promotional narration (if it's even possible to disentangle the two), issued from a perfectly correct sense of the American dominance of rock and pop music, and a legitimate resentment of this. Even though there is a good case to be made that the Smashing Pumpkins were better than Suede, and in spite of the awkward fact that, like the mods before them, the Britpoppers could only respond to rock's wrapping itself in the stars-and-stripes by wrapping themselves in the Union Jack, there was something praiseworthy about the urge to kick back at the bigger country. There was too  a sense in which working class identity was cool within Britpop culture. This didn't necessary translate into working class people themselves being cool, nor did the working class identity that was enacted on stages and lauded in the NME commonly bear much resemblance to anything that would have been recognised by many inhabitants of that class. Still, compared to today's hipster scene, where one gets the distinct sense that working class people are regarded not as voguish aliens to be emulated nervously, but as Brexit-voting, commercial music listening, racists who wouldn't know a good craft beer if they tasted one, it wasn't so bad. These things are relative.

Britpop was also capable of voicing discontent in a more or less articulate fashion. Admittedly, it most often came down on the 'less' side, but it remains the case that the raw anger of 'Is it worth the aggravation/ to get yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for?' has a lot going for it. Gallagher's devil-may-care drawl voices a nihilism more conditioned than staged. Blur were capable of framing their protest in more explicitly political terms. Mr Robinson in his quango is 'the self-professed saviour of the dim right-wing'. Ernold Same was narrated by the man described in the CD insert as 'the right-on Ken Livingstone'. It turns out that Damon Albarn was the source of the band's occasional leftism. Dave Rowntree was meanwhile an enthusiastic supporter of New Labour and ultimately a cheerleader for invading Iraq. Alex James now divides his time between making artisan cheeses and hanging out with the Chipping Norton set.

Alas, Britpop was not simply well-meaning angst and sticking two fingers up to Uncle Sam. It was in other respects, as we learned to say later, problematic in many respects.  This probably wasn't what Adorno had in mind when he said that every tale of civilisation is also a tale of barbarism, but nor is that line entirely irrelevant here (even if 'civilisation' is an optimistic description of Country House, and 'barbarism' an unkind take on Menswear). Culture is a human product, and as such is tainted from the outset with the conditions of its production, which means amongst other things with politics. This much is evident in the very word 'Britpop', a musical subgenre defined as much as anything by the state from which it issued. In this it bears some resemblance to the earlier Krautrock, although the acts generally classified as part of the latter are universally more interesting than Ocean Colour Scene. In both cases, there is a politics to the identification. Germany at the time of Krautrock was not one, but two, states. Britpop, in spite of its name, was an overwhelmingly English phenomenon. The most obvious exceptions are at best borderline cases: the Manic Street Preachers pre-date the movement slightly, and never really fitted in culturally or politically. Catatonia were of the period, but I never recall thinking of them as being 'part of the same thing' as Blur and Oasis. This was, retrospectively, a compliment. Ash were admittedly Irish, but in the face of eight centuries of national oppression the misdescription of a rock band seems a slight matter.

Claiming English idiosyncracies as uniformly British is a national pastime. A peculiarity of British rock music has been, at least until recently, its celebration of a certain kind of imagined working class identity, coupled with the occasional elevation of working class people themselves to superstar status. Britpop satisfied this fetish enthusiastically. Oasis certainly were from working class backgrounds, and spoke in interviews about being on the dole. Blur were from more monied stock in at the time ill-specified parts of East London but spoke like the love child of Dot Cotton and Dick van Dyke's chimney sweep. This was class as a marketing method; the proletariat were in this season, just as ripped jeans had been a few summers previously. The working class as presented in the posters and at the gigs was a pastiche, packaged for quick consumption. It was a matter of cheeky smiles and the hint of attitude, without taking the latter far enough to be intimidating. You expected Damon Albarn to shout 'oi, get orf me barrow' at any point. What the working class as adapted for Britpop certainly didn't lower itself to doing was work. Whilst The Who, the band Oasis wanted to be when they weren't busy trying to be the Beatles, could make a film in which a young man gets away from the drudgery of London toil, only for the hero of a mod dance floor to be revealed as a bellboy, by the 90s five days of the week were almost entirely absent from British musical output. Oasis, quite reasonably didn't want to work (Eagleton describes this as a good reason to be a socialist), but lyrically it was mostly a matter of falling in love, falling out of love, taking drugs, being a rock and roll star, and - in the case of one Blur song - listening to the shipping forecast. Put like this it sounds not unlike the life of a full time rock singer. Imagination was not a notable feature of the period.

The band often counted as part of Britpop who were better on class, in every sense in which a band could be, were of course Pulp. They are exempt from my criticism,  but were never really part of Britpop. The band predated the phenomenon by a long way, and accidentally hit the big time on the back of it. I've written about them before here. Whether or not 'nobody loves a tourist' was aimed, consciously or otherwise, at what their musical contemporaries were saying or doing, it captures some of the truth of an era. Even more dispiritingly, it speaks also to subsequent eras.

Candida Doyle's role in Pulp also distinguishes them from the run of Britpop star acts, which whiffed of Lynx and testosterone. A blokish, cliched working class masculinity suffused the genre. There were female fronted bands: none of them got the headlines and the best known, Elastica, obtained that status not least because their lead singer was sleeping with Damon Albarn, which doesn't suggest that Britpop represented a feminist high point. The best, and most under-rated, of the bands insufficiently male to be canonised were Kenickie. Notable for having singing in a regional accent that was, on the one hand, neither Cockney or Mancunian, and on the other genuine, they were musically and lyrically excpetionally. Misleadingly naive in content, their songs communicate a reality airbrushed by the comic book capers of Albarn and Gallagher they had this in common with Pulp. Lauren Laverne's wilting voice on 'People We Want' captures a darker side to the Britpop era, boredom and anxiety combine as insecure, in spite of cocaine, a young woman wades through a night out as though it were quicksand. 'This life, it's taking too long', she sings; and you know what she means.

The fear that life might not be worth living is not one that haunts the male Britpop oeuvre. It is fundamentally upbeat, macho even - although not aggressively so: with the possible exception of the Gallagher brothers, Britpop frontmen presented as new men. This did not make them averse to the odd nod and a wink. This was the era of new laddism; young men were busy learning from Loaded magazine that what, to a casual observer, might appear like sexism was in fact both ironic, and empowering for women. The apparently contradictory nature of these claims seems to have passed by for these born again feminists. The masculinity of Cool Britannia was resolutely heterosexual. In this respect it was less diverse than any other significant rock movement for a couple of decades. Brett Anderson performed an ambivalent androgyny: yet Suede were John the Baptist figures for Britpop, teetering uneasily on the brink of the New Covenant, quick to diminish so that Blur, Oasis, and countless derivative acts could take to the stage. When the messiah came, he was butch. On one occasion Alex James wore an Oasis t-shirt on Top of the Pops. He might just have well sported the slogan 'I've got a bigger dick than Noel Gallagher'. The intensity of the gender retrenchment in 90s music was in many respects laughable, even though it reflected, and fed back into  a much more dangerous backlash against feminism in society at large. It would be a cold-hearted person indeed, however, who didn't laugh - and not in the manner intended by the authors - at the ridiculous spectacle of 'Vindaloo' competing with 'Three Lions' for the number one spot, as the cultural icons of the period jockeyed to demonstrate their authentic football-supporting laddishness. It has always been unclear to me which team Alex James supports, but then I don't follow Chipping Norton Swifts closely, so I may be missing something. We should, I suppose, be grateful that Keith Allen allowed his mum and his gran to share in the bucket of vindaloo.

Singing about Goan food might have been de rigeur, but too many English people have always been more comfortable with Asian food than with Asian people. Britpop was white in its makeup and its cultural reference points. This in itself communicated something about how Britishness was understood at the time. The period coincides, for example, with Asian Dub Foundation's first releases - far more enduring and musically interesting than anything sung at Knebworth all those years ago, yet never counted as part of Britpop. This is both an injustice and a liberation.

The simplistic image of a white, male, straight, salt-of-the-earth, urban, sexual but not threatening, impish but never straightforwardly rebellious, working class was tailor made for New Labour. A wave of populism and flagwaving ushered Blair through the Downing Street gates, riding high on the legacy of forgotten protest and ageing hope. Elected, in large part by a class (contrary to much speculation, there are in fact working class people in marginal constituencies, even in the south of England), he wanted to govern a mass. A heady mix of 'progressive' nationalism and condescending ordinariness spewed forth from government onto a society already drenched with the same concoction by its rock stars. This was a Britpop government. And the Blairites imagined that the working class was as contemporary rockstars presented it: monocultural, in many ways reactionary, white, but with a sense of fair play and fun. The result was as politically ambiguous as Britpop itself was culturally: it gave us increased public spending and ASBOs, a minimum wage and asylum detention centres, the Human Rights Act and the invasion of Iraq.

There's a reluctant admission on the part of their sometime supporters that the Blair/ Brown governments did not usher in the New Jerusalem. Yet even this is narrated in terms of the working class as imagined in the Britpop era. We hear a lot about the forgotten people of the period, as indeed we should, the betrayal of core supporters by New Labour in government was real and deep. Quickly, however, this shades into talk of the white working class, the need to understand traditional values, generations of male pride lost to unemployment, concerns about immigration - in every way imaginable real and urgent social and economic crisis is renarrated in terms of a backlash against the gains of the past two decades as regards race and gender politics. In this way we end up with Blue Labour and its lingering influence. Nostalgia for Britpop fits in perfectly with this use of an ideological construction of class to defuse the politics of class. From the perspective of this project the immediate enemy is an out-of-touch metropolitan obsessed with the politically correct agenda of earlier times and unaware of the concerns of ordinary, hard-working, people. His name is Jeremy Corbyn.

Twenty years have passed, then. Were it not for the remarkable elevation of a socialist to the Labour leadership, it would be tempting to say that the most notable change is that privately educated rock aficionados no longer feel the need to adopt working class accents. These are not times in which Etonians lack confidence. That, more than the whimpering of Owen Smith, ought to serve as a cautionary tale for left-wing ebulience.

Excellent radio programme on Grunwick

'Grunwick Changed Me' - on Radio 4, here.

Socialism, ethics, and humanity (II)

(First in series here)

So socialism demands a fundamental change in the way the world is run, the establishment of which will be costly and will inevitably go beyond the current boundaries of political acceptability. People might therefore reasonably not want to sign up for it. Indeed this is the case. Most of the time, most people are not socialists. What will cause a fundamental shift here are not arguments but material circumstances: there is a lot of truth in the saying that any society is only one meal from revolution.

Admitting this much oughtn't to make us think that it is not important that we are able to provide reasons for being socialists. Quite apart from it not generally being a good idea to commit yourself to a cause without a good reason, that way lies the path of cultists and Justin Beiber fans, the extent to which socialist politics is able to take advantage of material circumstances depends on their being a critical mass of convinced socialists with the capacity to intervene in society and politics. The alternative to socialists being able to do this is, ultimately, what Marx and Engels called 'the mutual ruination of the contending classes', and penultimately what Luxemberg called 'barbarism'. This matters, then.

I've suggested that capitalism is inimical to human flourishing. This looks like a good reason to want to do away with it. In particular, it is inimical to human flourishing because - leaving aside the poverty and environmental degradation it has brought in its wake (I think, most of the time, we can just about imagine a capitalism without these) it prevents us individually and collectively from realising our positive capacities. It robs us of control of our own lives and destinies, and crucially of control of our own creative abilities. This, one might imagine, is more than enough reason to get rid of it, at least given the availability of an alternative lacking these faults (which, almost by definition, is what we mean by 'socialism').

This is, in very brief outline, an ethical case for socialism. Much of the Left is wary of ethics because it confuses it with moralism (which Marx rightly condemned, tending to call it simply 'morality'). Yet ethics, by which I mean an account - however implicit and untheorised - of human flourishing and how it might be achieved is unavoidable. We may as well be conscious and critical in formulating our ethics. Howewver from the point of view of many leftists, there is a lot more wrong with the position I've described than the venial sin of being ethical. It is, I claim, committed to a view of human nature.

Talk of human nature is, in some circles, slightly less respectable than necrophilia. So why burden ourselves with it? Simply because the question "why is not being in conscious control of one's capacity to work creatively inimical to human flourishing?" demands an answer. If that answer is to be one which isn't unacceptably subjective - "I just feel it is, that's all" or "It is for me, that's all I'm saying", making socialism a matter of taste, the political equivalent of adding the milk before the tea - then it needs to be potentially subject to public scrutiny. On the other hand, if we're not to be led off on an infinite regress of 'why' questions, we also want the answer to be a stopping point, or at least point to one. The answer "Because that's just the kind of things we are" fares well in both respects. We can test it, through attending to the universality of certain experiences within a given society, or - more carefully, the universality minus explicable apparent counter-examples of certain experiences. And somebody who asks "why" in response to it simply hasn't understood it.

Human nature has a bad press on the Left. No doubt because of the recent unfortunate episode called 'postmodernism' and the persistence of a certain kind of libertarian anthropology especially amongst the younger, more activist-orientated, left there is a suspicion that any concept of the human is inherently oppressive. The word "essentialist" often gets wheeled out here. Essentialism is a Bad Thing. It is, nonetheless, not entirely clear why admitting that water essentially contains one oxygen atom per molecule places one on the wide road to fascism. But perhaps it is being essentialist about ourselves that is a Bad Thing. Well, it is undoubtedly the case that ideas about human nature have been used to reinforce sexism, homophobia, racism, and numerous other oppressive and hierarchical doctrines. It simply doesn't follow that the thought that there is something common to human beings, or even to all human beings in a certain form of society, is itself culpable. Nor does believing in human nature commit one to the idea that human nature is static. In actual fact, it is deeply plausible that certain of a biological features are (to use another Bad Word) transhistorical, along with such characteristics as language use. Still, much changes about what it is to be human. We develop new wants and capacities as the societies in which we are formed themselves develop. It is simply confused to think that this presents a problem for the claim that there is any such thing as human nature. To say that something changes is not to say that it doesn't exist. If it did not exist, there would be nothing to change. Needless to say, it follows from this that we shouldn't assume that human nature is reducible to the biological.

Fine, but how do we tell if something jars with our nature, that in virtue of the kind of things we are it is incompatible with our flourishing? The process is drawn out, fragmentary, and draws on our nature (again) as experiencing and social beings. I catch a glimpse of what it is to be happier than I usually am, in a sense of the word "happy" that isn't simply a matter of fun but of a deeper contentment: perhaps in performing some craftwork or reading a poem, or through a relationship or tending a garden, I notice something that is missing in the rest of my life. I notice an agency, a capacity to relate to other people, a creativity and capacity for conscious directed projects that does not get used during the working day. Talking to others I notice that they feel the same. The process is negative, based on contrasts with partial hints of something better. It is an important part of the Left's task to collect and articulate these contrasts.

This is sketchy in the extreme, written hurriedly and compacting into a blogpost what would take a book to even begin to argue adequately (what, for example, are our 'positive' capacities, and how do we identify them?). But the position is recognisably continuous with Marx's thoughts in the 1844 Manuscript 'On Alienated Labour', read as part of an ethical tradition going back to Aristotle. It has a lot to commend it. What it's deeper implications are, and how we might communicate them, are another matter altogether.

Lies of the Labour leadership contest 7: There is mass Trotskyist arm twisting

Lie 7:

Trotsky entryists (sic) are twisting young arms in the Corbynite cause.

Bollocks because:

Look, I'll level with you. I'm happy to describe myself as a Trotskyist. For me this has more to do with the necessarily international nature of socialism and the centrality of working class agency to political change than, say, selling papers in a room above a pub. There is, you see, a bit of ambiguity as to what the word "Trotskyist" means. For a certain kind of Labour right-winger, schooled in the ways of NOLS, it means simply "someone a bit more left-wing than me". On this perspective, Trotskyism is more a matter of opposing academies than storming the Winter Palace.

But, on any reasonable understanding of the word, there are not many Trotskyists in Britain. We're talking the low thousands at most. The idea that they are in a position to enter the Labour Party and swing the result of a leadership election is either scaremongering or utopianism, depending on your view on these matters. On a bad day the combined ranks of British revolutionaries-from-below are not in a position to twist a lemon, let alone the arms of hundreds of thousands of impressionable youngsters. This, as I see it, is actually a problem. But Tom Watson really doesn't need to worry.

The idea that Trotskyists are not interested in winning elections is, by the way, absurd. And it is certainly the case that the mass of Corbyn supporters want Labour to win the next General Election, however unlikely the more clear sighted of us might acknowledge that to be. For many of these the aim of such a victory would be the rolling out of policies not out of place in the mouths of Roy Hattersley or John Smith. The Corbyn surge is a product not so much of popular conversion to the doctrine of Combined and Uneven Development as of the relentless rightward shift in Labour Policy since the mid-90s. Others amongst the surgers are products of a younger, more environmentally conscious, libertarian egalitarianism. Again, they have not reached this position as a result of reading The Revolution Betrayed.

Tom Watson is right about one thing. Arms are being twisted in this leadership election. To see this in action, however, you need to look not to dingy meetings on the state capitalism hypothesis but to the columns of the Guardian and the actions of PLP members. Corbyn is not the beneficiary.

Curb your moderation

My previous post, the first in a series, pointed to what I see to be a serious lack on the British Left, an absence of sustained thought. One promising counterbalance to this is the excellent journal Salvage, which I commend to readers as deserving your support.

I say this because what follows was an article written for Salvage. It would need updating in the light of the NEC election results, and the limited time I have available for political writing makes prevents this. In any case, they have far better and deeper reflections than mine to offer. Still I post it here just in case anyone finds it interesting.

Curb your moderation

It is often claimed that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but this is nonsense. The infernal highway is, rather, tarmacked with moderation. If ever a term was ideological in its innocent everydayness it is 'moderation'. There is nothing wrong with asking for a moderate helping of pudding, although even moderate exposure to the oeuvre of Coldplay might prove too much. Support for a football team can be moderate, just as one's drinking at the office Christmas party inevitably turns out to be immoderate. The tempo of a musical performance might be moderate, as might the incline of a hill or the difficulty of an exam question. Then, of course, politics might be moderate. It is, we are left in no doubt, good for politics for be moderate. The moderate shall inherit the earth, although when they do so their plans will be as consistently moderate as their expectations.

Moderation is something for which we should aim. This is particularly the case now that 'extremism' has been appointed as the folk devil de nos jours. Like many a brick in linguistic hegemony it is helpfully imprecise in its application, caring nothing for conventional political distinctions. Daesh are extremists; so are Britain First and Jeremy Corbyn. To this last extremist I will return in due course. Fortunately for the hard-working families of Middle England, the extremist menace does not terrorise our streets and polling booths unopposed. Enter the moderates. These champions of civilisation and rationality are the opposite to extremists, as celestial in their virtue as the latter are diabolical in their vice: contemporary ideology is nothing if not manichean.

To be moderate is to be reasonable, a concept which political philosopher Lorna Finlayson has keenly subjected to critical biopsy in her The Political is Political. The moderates are realistic, prepared to compromise, accepting of the parameters of the possible, and sensitive – within limits – to public opinion. Most schools of thought are blessed with their moderates. Since 2001 moderate Muslims have been much courted by politicians. Meanwhile David Cameron successfully, if somewhat improbably, branded his version of conservatism as moderate. One can also be a moderate Corbynite, supporting the elected leader of the Labour Party, but not in a way that ruffles too many feathers. That, at least is the plan; it turns out that some feathers in the Parliamentary Labour Party are as easily ruffled as Boris Johnson's hair. Those content to rain bombs on the Middle East are, it seems, uncommonly fragile beasts.

For moderate Corbynites the leadership is to be supported and popular policies developed on a broadly social democratic basis. Alliances are to be formed with the centre and old-right in order to secure Jeremy's position, especially given the current composition of the PLP. More generally, however, the gains of the Corbyn surge can only be secured by a gentle approach, reaching out across the breadth of the Labour Party, reassuring centrists at constituency level. Jeremy's tent is to be a big one indeed.

The soft-left

The soft-left, to give the moderate Corbynites another more familiar name, are a force to be reckoned with. Key positions within the Momentum organisation are filled by moderates, including crucially founder Jon Lansman. The general thrust of Momentum, whilst bringing welcome demographic breadth and cultural and aesthetic imagination to the left, has been a cautious one, reinforced at the level of many local groups, and supported by influential organisations like Socialist Action. The case for moderation, however, can also get a serious hearing within parts of Labour customarily thought of as hard-left – the present author's home territory. Here the refrain weaves together the celebratory and the weary in a curious harmony: we have done well, things are immeasurably better, but let's not do too much – we don't want to alienate the centre. Father Dougal McGuire once summed up this outlook in a memorable slogan, 'Careful Now'. As I'll have cause to remark again in a moment, upon analysis the view turns out to be suggesting that we carry on doing what we have been doing for the past two decades. Thus a significant proportion of Britain's organised anti-capitalists at one of the most crucial political junctures for years.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the case of Ann Black. A veteran of Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC), and frequently topping the poll of constituency members, she has consistently enjoyed the support of the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA), which has been backed by the Party's left. This might seem surprising given Black's less than impressive voting record. At important points, the suspension of Lutfur Rahman in Tower Hamlets and subsequent expulsions of his supporters being a key example, Black did not act as might be expected from a left-winger.

In the interests of fairness it should be frankly admitted at this stage that Black has never claimed to be a left-winger. Her politics are those of a social democratic centre that would have been thought right-wing in the Labour Party of the 1980s: Roy Hattersley is an exemplar of the genre. The left formed an alliance with this current in the early 2000s context of Blairism, from a position of weakness, the cause of defending the basics of party democracy, the welfare state, and trade unionism. It was, however, an alliance born of circumstance rather than deep shared conviction. And so, when Labour's NEC voted in late July to disenfranchise new members of the Labour Party in the coming leadership election, Black supported the move, and subsequently oversaw the suspension of Brighton and Hove District Labour Party. This was too much for the hard-left Labour Representation Committee (LRC), which put out a statement saying that it would never again support Black for the NEC.

Less surprising than the LRC's response was the reaction of some on the Labour left to that response. This has ranged from discomfort to anger; I have witnessed some of it myself. The LRC is putting the election of the CLGA slate at risk, perhaps it is even undermining the Corbyn leadership. Certainly, in order to improve its position on the NEC, the left needs to win the hearts and minds of people who think like Ann Black, and of those who are attached to her as a representative . On the face of it this is odd, given that the majority of those voting in the 2016 NEC election are new to Labour and have probably never heard of Ann Black. However much the flame of social democracy might still burn in terms of widespread affection for the NHS, this passion for Bevanism doesn't generally extend to memorising the names of the doctrine's current proponents. One explanation of the soft-left discomfort would be that people have not come to terms with the new reality and that, when they think of the Labour Party, they still think of the people who went to their CLP bingo evening five years ago.

To grasp why the appeal for moderation over matters like the Black case found receptive ears on the left, we need to understand the Labour left's recent history. To grasp why the appeal was misplaced, we need to understand its present reality.

Politics in an age of waiting

From the mid-80s onwards Labour's left was in decline from the high point of Tony Benn's 1981 challenge for the deputy leadership. Demoralised by the defeat of the Miners' Strike and of left-wing local authorities by Thatcher, it was weakened by the expulsions around Militant and undermined by policy shifts in a right-wing direction. Matters were not helped by the fact that the retreat from Bennism was led by a man who had once been in the left's own ambit. Neil Kinnock was the soft-left candidate to replace Michael Foot. On his shift right, he took a number of left-wing MPs, and rather more party members with him. All of this happened, moreover, in a context of rampant privatisation and marketisation and of the global dominance of neo-liberalism. The left's defeat was finalised and given governmental expression by Tony Blair.

What was the Labour left to do in these circumstances? It was weak, defensive, and without the capacity to act as a significant force in Labour's internal politics. Such circumstances are ripe for alliance-building, and so the CLGA was born. During this period, from the mid-90s onwards, much of the Labour left (outside organised Trotskyist groups, at least) occupied tactically the ground vacated by the former soft-left, hoping to defend the gains of the post-war period, retain Labour's status as a trade-union forces, and rally the remnant forces of labourism. Where Labour Briefing once carried a column called 'Class Traitor of the Month' it now ran defences of the NHS and council housing that would not have been out of place in a Fabian Society publication a decade previously.

This shift in position was perfectly reasonable and, as far as I can judge, correct. Now, Keynes probably didn't ever ask “When the facts change, I change my mind; what do you do?”, but it is a good question, and the problem with the stance of much of the Labour left is that the facts have changed. From the post-Blairite ashes of the Labour Party a phoenix of sorts has risen. New members in their tens of thousands have joined to support Corbyn. Salvage is hardly the place for displays of unqualified optimism, and its certainly true that the new support is politically uneven and fragile. What it is not, however, is full of Ann Black clones. It is culturally disjoint from much of the Labour Party, younger and more ethnically diverse than the standing Labour left. The tactics that kept the flame burning throughout the 90s and 00s should now be cosigned to history. Worrying about how the Corbyn movement relates to the old Labour centre in the context of present Labour politics is rather like obsessing about alliances with Andorra when planning a geopolitical strategy.

The issue is that the moderate-tempered part of the Labour left doesn't see things like this. Whether it is constituency left activists who continue concerned, as they have been for much of their political adulthood, with winning over the wobbly moderates, talking them round over real ale and folk music; or whether it is the slicker, more digitally competent and Zeitgeist sensitive Momentum leadership, many of the people most active in doing left-wing politics in the Labour Party have been formed in the habit of guarding against steering left, for fear of upsetting the moderates and losing them to the Blairites. They have grown used to compromises of a certain sort. Their learned impulse is to suppress their inner socialist at key moments. Old habits die hard in this respect, and it certainly must be difficult to start talking about ownership of the means of production when you've spent the past twenty years talking about footpaths. In any case, it might be the case that some Labour leftists have come to like this way of doing politics. Perhaps the constituency activist enjoys his regular pint with the Gatiskellites; it seems probable that the Momentum leadership like their new found position, even if they political compass has changed surprisingly little. In practice, certainly, it directs them to triangulate centrewards, appeasing parliamentary opinion in the hope of winning reforms.

Unfortunately, accommodating the centre looks like a bad tactic, even in terms of the minimal aim of sustaining Corbyn's position. The Labour centre is irrelevant; what matters is keeping the support and enthusiasm of those of have flocked to Labour to support Corbyn. Often politically inexperienced and idealistic, it is difficult to imagine a thing less likely to appeal to this constituency than buckling under pressure and perceived sell-outs. Still worse are non-instrumental appeals to 'the unity of the Labour Party'. The unity of the Labour Party is as real as the Loch Ness Monster, and were this not the case Jeremy Corbyn would not have been elected in the first place. The Corbyn moment was born of crisis, a political crisis both of working class representation and relatedly of labourism, in Ralph Miliband's sense of that term. There is no possibility of going back to before the crisis.

The phenomenon of Corbynism, which is the closest Britain (or, more accurately, England) will get to a Podemos or Syriza any time soon, far from being a sign of the revival of labourism is a manifestation of its death throes. The old coalition that was the Labour Party, grouped together in the hope of securing reforms favouring the working class, and of winning a mass of their votes on that basis is in secular decline now that capitalism can no longer afford social democracy. The value of the Corbyn leadership is precisely not that he makes possible a return to the post-war consensus like some kind of political TARDIS. This is not a bad thing: the rose tinted spectacles of enthusiasts for social democracy tend not to notice the signs on doors reading 'No dogs, no blacks, no Irish', nor the housewife holding back the tears with valium. Corbyn, however partially and inadequately, realises that some kind of change is needed. He represents a break with the neo-liberal consensus and opens up a space in which people can dream again. This is, of course, threatening to those who see in dreams only a threat to a good night's sleep.

Moderate compromise

The point is not that compromise is not possible, still less that it is not needed. Any politics grounded in reality requires prioritisation, alliance building, and negotiation. This is surely particularly true of socialist engagement with electoral politics under capitalism. The demand that left politicians never compromise, that nothing short of their full programme (whatever that might consist in) will suffice, deserves Lenin's sobriquet 'an infantile disorder' if anything does. The question to be asked is not whether we compromise but to which ends we compromise.

Power at any cost is not a price worth paying. This is as true if the power in question is wielded by Jeremy Corbyn as it is when some Blairite nonentity is justifying their betrayals by appeal to 'keeping Labour in power'. Socialists presented with governmental or party-political power use it, at least in theory, only in order to transform it and so to further the transformation of society itself. They use their platform to promote their own ideas and challenge those which cement the present order. Crucially, they consider their own position a lever with which to strengthen those of the working class and oppressed groups. Attempts to cling to power, moves to compromise, and the formation of alliances are judged by these criteria, and only entered into if they succeed by them. The radical left, unlike the moderates – whether by conviction or habit, does not understand these things as goods-in-themselves, the sign of a mature politics, but as tactics towards the end of a human future.

If the moderate ever do inherit the earth, a prospect which even by the pollyannaish criteria of liberals looks unlikely in the age of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, it might not turn out to be worth inheriting. For here is the ultimate irony: whatever else moderation in its soft-left form might be, it is not realistic. Eagleton has more than once remarked that it is not revolutionaries who are dewy eyed utopians, but those who believe that capitalism can be made to work for the majority of the world's population. We live in a world in which the demand that every child have enough food to nourish them is an extreme one, which cannot be realised within the constraints of the present economic system

In such a world there is an imperative to be an extremist. In Britain, that means to be an extreme Corbynite.  

Socialism, ethics, and humanity (I)

Owen Jones, you will remember, claims that Jeremy Corbyn lacks a clear vision. This was utterly confused, and therefore considerably better than the rest of Jones' now infamous article, which wasn't confused but just wrong. In spite of this, like the proverbial stopped clock, Jones was accidentally onto something true. There is something in the region of vision that the Left around Corbyn does lack; and this is a problem.

We fail in not having a clearly articulated long-term goal, nor any kind of strategy for getting there. By any criteria this is a pretty big absence for a political party. It is, in this particular case, a problem not just for our day to day political activities and ability to communicate our politics, but also for our culture, individual lives, and thought. In is in this last area that it might be thought that a remedy could be found, but here the historically anti-intellectual Labour Left, steeped in a pragmatic empiricism suspicious of anyone who knows too much about Adorno without a concomitant experience of housing committees, is at a disadvantage. Why theorise when there are leaflets to be delivered?

But what do I mean by saying that we, as a movement, I mean the pro-Corbyn Left particularly as grouped around Momentum, lack a goal? Surely we have one that can be summed up with pleasing economy in one word: "socialism". Well, yes, perhaps. But if that word is to serve as anything other than a synonym for "social democat" or a placeholder for vague thoughts of niceness and community, the problems have only begun when we claim an allegiance to socialism.

Scour the blue skies thinking documents of contemporary political parties and you will find affirmations of fidelity to the free-market economy, working families, home ownership, economic growth and various other unremarkable desiderata designed to please the perennially sensible occupants of Middle England. This wish list, which reads too much like the contents of a Telegraph columnist's wet dream to be entirely comfortable reading, is unified by the fact that meaningful steps can be taken towards realising each strategic goal by government policies implemented during the course of a five year parliament. Or, to put the point more carefully (with "economic growth" in particular in mind), it doesn't seem implausible from the perspective of dominant schools of thought to suppose that such steps can be pursued. Crucially, policies directed towards these ends will in no way threaten prevailing structures of economic power nor the organisation of the state. They could be implemented at the level of the nation-state, possibly in concert with other nation-states acting through bodies like the IMF or the EU, or through trade agreements or treaties.

Contrast this will the goal of socialism. This has none of these unifying features. Socialism is a much bigger deal than increasing the number of households with mortgages. As I understand the word it involves the human race moving beyond capitalism and replacing it with collective ownership and control of the earth's resources and our creative activity with them. This is a more ambitious project than improving recycling facilities. It can, in my view, be established only internationally and through the collective action of the mass of working people. As such it does not sit comfortably with the view that political change best happens by parliamentary vote or ministerial announcement. Marx described the institution of socialism as the beginning of human history. The Diggers foreshadowed the modern doctrine with their talk of the earth as a common treasury. None of this would fit well in an election manifesto.

Socialism simply doesn't accommodate itself to the norms for political strategies. This is one excellent reason that those committed to those strategies think that socialism is unrealistic, as indeed it is within the confines of politics-as-usual. Those of us who are socialists think, conversely, that socialism is the only reality-based response adequate to a world which combines starvation with plenty, industrialisation with slums. We also take the cautious view that it will probably be centuries before the issue is decided to everyone's satisfaction. For these reasons socialism is automatically disadvantaged by any approach to politics which demands results within five years, directed towards goals within the remit of government policy. The entire set-up of the political game functions to preserve the status quo.

How to break the impasse? It is undeniable that in order to win the enthusiasm and allegiance of millions for socialism we need a goal that inspires. Yet this can't be provided in the terms that we have grown to expect in Western democracies. And even if it could, oughtn't we to be wary? The history of blueprints for socialism is hardly auspicious. As I see it, the problem is urgent, and only not seen as such because there is not nearly enough clarity around as to what we ourselves mean by "socialism" (and, after all, if the issue does dawn, there will always be an opportunity to put off thinking about it with a clear conscience: let's sort out this immediate crisis first...). In the next post in this series I'll suggest - no doubt to howls from some of my comrades - that the way forward requires us to have a more substantive ethical basis for our socialism.

Lies of the Labour leadership contest 6: New Labour was a mass social movement

Lie 6:

No really.

Bollocks because:

Really? I mean, you need to ask? Wow.

A group of swing voters waiting to listen to Alan Milburn 1997